Heavenly Bodies

Dinner by the lake.

Photographs for XX Chromosome

Dakle, ovo je projekat koji sam radio sa Sanjom Čežek pod nazivom XX Chromosome.
Uživajte.

 // ISSUE #01 / Pilot project, one editorial
 
CEO and ART DIRECTION // Sanja Cezek
PHOTOGRAPHER // Goran Tesanovic
MODEL // Marija Mandic
VISUAL IDENTITY // Sanja Cezek

Also, a post from Sanja Cezek about the book and its identity.

Unknown to others

We talked as we passed through

I know that it's been a long while, but I'm back, more alive then ever.

Blood Ties

something unFamiliar.

The endless summer.

taken in the summer of 2012. 

I thought this would be easier or quicker but in this life of mine apparently nothing is easy or quick; if it is, it is just a lie and nothing else, I keep telling to myself.

Breaking dawn with Rosa, how it must have been, is almost perfect, but not perfect for me, nor for her. I’m breathing in silence, because it is the only thing that’s present. The two of us are only ghosts, because it is my only desire, and sometimes also hers.

She is sitting, tightening her right hand.
Of course, nothing strange about that since that is the side of her that was always hurting her, both emotionally and physically. She was missing her right side, I was gifted with my left. The two of us are one.

‘Why are you quiet?’, I asked her.
‘Do I need to tell anything?’, she answered.
‘No’, I said nervously ‘just sit and be still.’

And then I began to sweat. I was nervous, my hands were shaking. I would say something like ‘Oh, the light falls beautifully across your face’ just to kill the silence around us, but it keeps pressing harder.
And then I would just get out of the room.
I’m washing my face, and the water keeps burning though it is freezing cold. Colder than anything I felt, and this is the warmest summer.

I shot the whole film and it is too early for me to take another one. ‘No worries’, I would say to myself, ‘this is the longest time of your life’.  

I always somehow return to that same place, hurting myself. I keep cutting through the same scars and breaking my bones all over again. But then again, these are some wounds that have slipped through the grasp of my memory and only emptiness resides there.

I don’t remember Rosa in the beginning. I keep lying in my bed, I don’t want and I can’t move.
One blink, a whole week has passed and I haven’t seen her , and every moment felt like a lifetime. She is nowhere, standing by the window. She is posing, royally, because she never anything else.
I took my camera and made a photograph. The moment was frozen and saved, but it matters not because the memory fades and consciousness disappears.

I don’t know a lot of things in this life of mine, but I always keep thinking about the things I know.
Every cherry that I ate with her became a new memory for me. Every memory became a new scene. Every scene was a new portrait. Every portrait was a new face. The face is new, she is the same and so and so on.

And the summer has just begun. 

Introspection

So, a lot of time has passed since I've posted anything here. Feels like nothing important has changed but in the contrary, everything did.
So, I call this blog entry introspection because this is the term, assignment, call it whatever you want to what has been occupying my life in the couple of months that have passed. Okay, the Academy of Arts here in Novi Sad has arranged a group exhibition for the photographers that are attending it. It was a great deal. I was excited about it, very excited, because I didn't understand what this meant. 'the act of looking within oneself.' 

Then it hit me: I NEVER DID ANYTHING INTROSPECTIVE THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY IN MY LIFE.

This thought haunted me for two months.
I even gave up a few times before it hit me.

In December, the 26th I made a decision to change myself both physically and mentally so I could actually deal with this thing called introspection.
In the following weeks after that decision I was writing down things that I wasn't ready to talk about with anyone. Family business, private thoughts, fears, desires, things that I'm ashamed of and things that have hurt me and scared me. I started making photographs that were an interpretation to those things.
I decided that I should do a big book for the exhibition that would contain photographs and inserts from my diary. The book will contain mostly original prints and contact sheets made by myself in these past months.

I call the book 'The Black Book of Alienation' and I have divided it into four sections: '1. Life, 2. Family, 3. Death, 4. Love'.

1. Life
-Let go
-'My Mad Fat Diary'
-Endless summer

2. Family 
-an unFamiliar portrait #1
-an unFamiliar portrait #2
-an unFamiliar portrait #3

3. Death
-Cigarette butts and piano lessons
-September
-The land that I once called home

4. Love
-Guitar picks scar bodies
-Intimacy in us, intimacy in others
-12

These are the titles to the story of my life if you could call it that.
I will give you a glimpse of the Family section.

The exhibition will be held sometime in May, I think, in Novi Sad in the 'Factory'. I will give full details once I learn them.